Steven Porricelli has never thrown his wife’s laptop out the window, but he’s wanted to.

“Technology is a necessary evil,” he told LifeWire about his wife, Jane, who runs MomGenerations.com. “She’s always texting in one hand and Twittering (an online social network and messaging service) on the other. I’ve woken up before and she’ll be zonked out in bed with the laptop on her lap. It’s insane.”

My husband can relate—and he’s not the only one.

“She grabbed my iPhone out of my hand, threw it on the ground and actually stomped on it,” my friend Peter told me in a recent conversation about why he’d broken up with his latest object of affection. “It’s too bad because the phone was OK and I really liked her, but, you know, on principle. I mean, WTF? Who stomps on stuff past the age of four?”

When I asked him how long she’d been trying to get his attention, he grudgingly admitted he didn’t know.

CRACK IS WHACK

They don’t call them CrackBerries for nothing. In mid-2007, The Guardian reported on a survey conducted by AOL and Opinion Research of 4,025 Americans over 13 years of age, which found that six out of 10 people use their mobile email gadgets in bed and at least four reply to messages in the middle of the night.

In March, Brian Alexander, who writes the Sexploration column for MSNBC.com followed up on the trend: as of March, 25 million Americans use a smart phone like the BlackBerry or Treo and 68 percent of Americans say they feel anxiety when they’re disconnected from the web.

Alexander points to a study by Sleep Council, a UK-based bed industry group which found eight of 10 people are playing with their high-tech gadgets before bedtime and one in three sends or receives text messages or e-mails while in bed.

A more recent study from Sheraton Hotels found that about 87 percent of users take their gadgets into the bedroom, 84 percent check them just before going to bed and as soon as they wake up, and at least 85 percent say they look for messages in the middle of the night.

AMBIENT AWARENESS–AN AGGREGATE PHENOMENON

A piece by Clive Thompson in The New York Times Magazine summarized the growing popularity of online interaction as a reaction to modern social isolation.

“The mobile workforce requires people to travel more frequently for work, leaving friends and family behind,” Thompson writes. “Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor—a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties.”

This is how. Social scientists call our incessant online contact “ambient awareness.”

“It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does—body language, sighs, stray comments—out of the corner of your eye,” Thompson writes.

“It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, told [Thompson]. “No message is the single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.”

But is it just helping us stay connected or is it completely changing the expectations we have of our interaction? I think therefore I am, right—but is a thought not really a thought unless it’s a tweet?

Is living the thrill of a relationship without an audience no longer enough? Who can forget Heartbreak Soup or Jakob and Julia? I am continuously haunted by a tweet by former Valleywag writer, Melissa Gira Grant: “Uneasy truth: this relationship makes more sense with an audience. It’s when we’re most honest?”

Is talking to a single person at a time no longer enough, do we need the continuous bombardment of data from all corners of the world? The Sheraton study mentioned in the section above found that more than a third of those surveyed said that if they were forced to make a choice between their partners and their PDA, they’d keep their gadget.

THE IRL DISCONNECT

“I can’t decide what’s harder, being in a relationship with someone who’s as obsessively online as you, or being in a relationship with someone who isn’t connected at all, or only minimally,” I say to my friend Atherton Bartelby during one of our daily exchanges.

“I’d say being in a relationship with someone who isn’t in connected at all or minimally,” he responds, “because they don’t understand the anxiety one experiences when they’re disconnected.”

He’s right about the anxiety. Solutions Research Group, which surveys user technology habits, published a report earlier this year called “Age of Disconnect Anxiety,” which found 68 percent of Americans say they feel disoriented, nervous and anxious when deprived of internet access.

“I dated someone who was online just as much as I was, if not more,” I tell Atherton. “Often, we’d be in the same room for hours, but we hardly talked. We had a rule against talking in the ‘computer lab,’ actually. If we had something to say, we’d IM. But it wasn’t chit chat, it had to be important.”

“Dude, that’s totally messed up,” Atherton responds. “I don’t think it was technology’s problem. I think it was you guys.”

He’s not wrong about that. But neither am I wrong that sometimes ambient awareness tools, which are made to facilitate communication and enable connection, can get in the way of communication in a relationship and cause a major disconnect.

For her piece for LifeWire, Diane Mapes talked to Joe Guppy, a Seattle couples counselor, who agreed.

“Communication problems seem to be the number one thing people ask about when they call,” Guppy told Mapes. “They come to the session and pay me $100 just so they can sit together and talk. And to me, the number one red flag is if each person is engaged in their own cyberworld or video world. I had one couple that would even get into arguments via text message.”

HARD DRIVE OVER SEX DRIVE

A friend of mine calls Twitter the anti-marriage, which is funny because he wants to marry a girl he hooked up with on the microblogging platform.

But still, I can’t help but agree. As our networks expand thanks to social technology and people cater more and more to our niches, we’re less likely to move in the same circles and discuss the same things with our significant others. Social networking may enable us to hook up far more easily, and ambient awareness may accelerate the development of our relationships, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t taking a toll on established relationships.

And it’s not just about taking real quality time together with zero interruptions—it’s affecting sex, too. In his Sexploration column, Brian Alexander declared how surprised he was by reports on technology and human interaction, which, “if taken together, could indicate that we are spending big money to kill off our sex lives.”

Alexander quotes Marta Meana, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies desire and treats people suffering from low to no desire, including couples in “sexless” marriages.

“There are reasons to believe there is a link,” Meana says of sex drive and technology. “If we are feeling like we are multi-tasking a lot, and our attention is divided many ways, that is getting in the way of making quiet time to have sex and really focus on another human being … Unfortunately, we do not privilege sensuous activity and sexuality the way we should in our marriages.”

REPAIR LOCAL AREA CONNECTION?

My husband is so jealous of my laptop that if he could take it out back for a fistfight, he probably would. Luckily, he can’t, because I’m not sure he’d win, as he’s not exactly the fighting kind.

“You being on the internet makes me feel isolated the way you feel isolated when you’re not on the internet,” he said recently when I told him what I was writing about.

“That’s because I am your internet, darling.”

I waited for him to retort, “no, iJustine is my internet.” But he didn’t. He doesn’t know who Justine Ezarik is or that on her Twitter bio she says, “I am the internet.”

Joe Guppy, the couples counselor cited above, suggests a way to keep connected to your partner in the age of perma-connection to the world: involving your partner in your digital distractions. Other people suggest weekly technology sabbaticals.

Outside of YouPorn, I haven’t had much success getting my husband excited about my digital distractions. But we have established that lunch, dinner and bed time are one-on-one interaction times.

It’s going well. I mean, we fought less when we hardly interacted. But, you know, at least we’re talking.

This piece was written for Gloom Cupboard

“Deep down, all insecure sluts just want to be loved.”

It’s not the kind of response you’d imagine a bride-to-be would receive after announcing her engagement, but that’s exactly what Jezebel’s Tracie Egan got after she posted about her coming nuptials earlier this month.

“I can’t imagine having the time on my hands to obsess about someone I claim to hate, follow their writing and then going out of my way to try to make them feel bad,” she wrote in her blog this week.

Few people can, though you’d think that with all the stuff that’s constantly going on in this fast-paced place we call the World Wide Web, that most of us would be too busy to waste time being discourteous to other people.

Wrong.

“The technology, which allows its users to inflict pain without being forced to see its effect, also seems to incite a deeper level of meanness,” Amy Harmon wrote in the New York Times four years ago. “Psychologists say the distance between bully and victim on the Internet is leading to an unprecedented—and often unintentional—degree of brutality, especially when combined with a typical adolescent’s lack of impulse control and underdeveloped empathy skills.”

But these aren’t adolescents we’re talking about here. They’re adults and even though the web isn’t as wild as it used to be, we’re still acting without any sense.

JUST STOP READING

My good friend Atherton Bartelby is the one who turned me on to Time Out New York columnist and former Star editor-at-large Julia Allison. Allison, who gained celebrity online thanks largely to media blog Gawker, is a central figure in the microcelebrity wave and a frequent target of random reader hatred.

I got to see the metamorphosis happen first-hand and I still don’t know what happened. Atherton absolutely loved her columns up until some point over the summer, when he became cross with her over nothing in particular and started railing about everything she did with the fire of a thousand trolls.

Neither he nor I know Allison personally (she and I exchanged a couple of e-mails in June and I think may have I freaked her out with a rant about love and Stendhal), but she was so often a topic of Atherton’s rants that he and I actually had a fight about her.

“Why are you so angry?” I asked him one day over the phone, following a tirade about how reading about her at some tech event was giving him angina. “Julia is so pop! Andy Warhol is giggling from the other side. I think you’re jealous.”

He didn’t hang up on me, but I know he wanted to.

Ultimately, we have power over what we read. We can choose to spend our day reading content that inspires and informs us or waste it on blogs we don’t enjoy.

Personally, I don’t think there are any bad bloggers out there. There are bloggers I love and bloggers into whose target demographic I don’t fit. It doesn’t mean they suck, it just means they’re not for me. So I don’t read them. Simple, right?

“Dude, just stop reading her blog.”

But he couldn’t.

WHAT WOULD JACKIE DO?

Dear Emily Post Institute,

I’m greatly enjoying your latest edition of Etiquette and thank you for the time you have put into making available an updated version of such a helpful guide. I must admit, however, that I find the chapter on electronic communication a little lacking. Seeing as most of our interaction in this day and age occurs on the web, I strongly recommend future editions give more space to this matter.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Sincerely,
AV Flox

SUBPRIME FAME

In August, Wired ran a story about internet fame featuring Julia Allison. The article, which was part of Wired’s How-To issue, gave tips for aspiring fameballs: seek photo ops with high-profile people, dress to draw attention, keep your readers guessing, let your minions fight your battles, and be a hot woman with an exhibitionist streak.

It was a fun, light-hearted piece. Most readers hated it.

“Wired is supposed to be a legitimate source for all things technology,” wrote a reader identifying himself as Tomcore, “and helping further propagate a wannabe-celebutant—clarification—wannabe ROFLcon celebutant like Julie [sic] Allison, discredits the source. Don’t waste your time or ours doing reporting on insignificant attention hungry parasites. They’re everywhere and hardly worthy a Wired cover. Or at least if you do—make it someone entertaining—like the Starwars Kid.”

The rest of the web wasn’t far behind. At Valleywag, where Melissa Gira Grant had written a piece on the subject, a commenter whined, “I just cancelled my Wired subscription because of this Julia crap. I’m sorry but she is not a geek, not news worthy, not VC funding worthy. She is a high maintanence [sic] attention whore making a mockery of the industry. There are so many women they could have put on that cover that are intelligent geeks but instead they chose her. It is completely wrong and Wired should be ashamed of themselves for falling for her bullshit.”

At Gawker, the blog that’d made her famous, commenters were busy discussing how badly Photoshopped her legs looked. And on this month’s Wired, a reader graced the Rants section with the following jab, “She’s not worth the pixels she demands on our screens, and if I could find a way to blame her for the current mortgage crisis, I would.”

YOUR TURN

Last week Atherton published a piece featuring the ten most charming and often overlooked places in Hawaii. The piece, which was a final tribute to his time on the islands, took him days. He was so excited, he actually IMd me a link as soon as he wrapped up.

Not even a day later, an anonymous commenter hit his blog: “I find it interesting that on this list of must-dos almost none of the photographs are yours… surely in ten years you’ve actually ‘done’ these places at least once, enough to snap a pic or at least give us something more personal about your recommendation. Fairly or not, this leads one to believe that your recommendations are based not from personal experience but rather a spastic and deliberately obscure aggregation of ‘bests’ from travel blogs or hiking trail sites.”

While we build better blogs with criticism than we do with fawning praise, I’m disappointed that someone would take the time to reply to a carefully put-together blog post simply to scold the writer for not using his own images, insinuate he has never visited any of the specified locations, and attack him for being “deliberately obscure”—isn’t the whole point of the post to bring to light the lesser known wonders of the islands?

I don’t disagree that seeing these places through the blogger’s eyes would have been more interesting, however unprofessional or blurry the picture. A constructive suggestion would have been, “I know a lot of people don’t carry cameras when they hike and if they do, don’t always take the best photos, but this post would have been better if you had shared what you saw of these locations that touched you so deeply, even if they aren’t professional quality.”

There’s an immense difference between helpful critique and hurtful criticism. Critique may not always be easy to take, but those offering it do it with the objective of helping those whose content they enjoy to develop even better content. We do it with firm words but never lose sight of the effort the creators of the content have put forth.

INVISIBLE VANDALISM

“When you’re a victim of a personal attack online, the first thing to remember is this: It’s extremely difficult to put yourself out there on the web, but it’s supremely easy to critique or mock others who do,” wrote Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani a couple of years ago.

Her comments are something that will always stay with me because of how simple and true they are. It’s not easy to put your thoughts and experience out into the world, especially in a culture that believes that they have the right to destroy everything that isn’t hidden or somehow protected.

“Would you graffiti a car in the street just because it wasn’t parked inside a garage?” I asked a friend once.

“That analogy doesn’t even make sense,” she responded. “The car belongs to someone.”

“So do the words used to represent the thoughts this person is expressing. So does that blog. The internet is a space and a post is a person’s property. And by leaving a vicious and useless anonymous comment, you’re vandalizing it.”

She didn’t respond.

“The web is crawling with overcaffeinated surfers who have been staring at a glowing box for hours—not the ideal environment for human interaction,” Trapani explained in her Lifehacker piece. “It’s easy to take out frustrations on someone online because they don’t quite feel real. Talking smack puts people in a position of power, one they want to be in because they feel small and weak in other areas of their lives. The key words here are ‘small’ and ‘weak.’”

FACE-OFF

“I’m really glad it happened,” Atherton told me the following day over coffee. “It’s helped me appreciate Julia Allison on a whole other level.”

Just then an e-mail tumbled into my inbox directly from my blog’s contact page: “Your piece about Philip Noble [sic] is insulting. First Nick Douglas and now this? You’re a male apologist and a cheap male-pleaser and you need to have your va-jay-jay card revoked.”

The e-mail address the commenter had included is telling “not@telling.com”. If a commenter can’t even include a working e-mail address or URL, he is a coward who lacks the courage of his convictions and isn’t worth another thought.

Don’t get me wrong—it’s OK to disagree with people, but always ask yourself if you have something to bring to the table. Personal attacks and assumptions about the people who have expressed their views before you are not valid arguments for anything. If you’re so enraged by what you read that you can’t function, then don’t try! Offending others will not make them more likely to listen to you. In fact, it often has the exact opposite effect.

It’s not that difficult to present an opposing viewpoint in a constructive way. Just follow the rule of the Cs: be civil, clear, concise and constructive. Build, don’t break.

I can’t imagine anyone calling me a misogynist to my face, and neither can I see anyone walking up to Egan and calling her an insecure slut.

In a web 2.0 world, I think we need to change the old saying, “if you can’t say something nice” to “if you wouldn’t say it to my face, then don’t say anything at all.”

If you still can’t play nice, then, to quote Egan, “FAQ you.”

Last week Tuesday The Rocky Mountain News created a stir in the blogosphere after one of their journalists used text messaging to report the funeral of the toddler that was killed when an SUV flew through the window of a Colorado Baskin Robbins.

The story exploded nationally when it was reported that the man responsible for the accident was an illegal immigrant who’d not only never had a license, but had a lengthy rap sheet, including 20 previous arrests.

Following the funeral of the boy, the attention shifted to the media. Berny Morson, a journo for The Rocky Mountain News, used the micro-blogging platform Twitter to take notes at the young boy’s funeral using his cell phone.

Live-tweeting—that is, reporting live using Twitter—is very common. From the Democratic and Republican National Conventions to the season premier of the CW show Gossip Girl, everyone’s doing it.

John Dickerson, who covers the presidential campaign for Slate, told The Washington Post, “If I have a thought that occurs to me, I’ll fire it off. Sometimes it ends up being the lead of a piece, or the notion a piece gets framed around.”

It’s probably not the first time someone has live-tweeted a funeral (heaven knows everything from being fired to giving birth has been live-tweeted since Twitter went live in 2006), but to my knowledge, this is the first time that a newspaper has run the unedited stream of live-tweets from a funeral as a sidebar on a major story.

Cara Degette at The Colorado Independent called it, “utterly, and unforgivingly, inconceivable.”

I asked Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU who’s very active on Twitter, what he thought.

“My opinion is that you need to separate the method—Twittering from a funeral—from the execution; were these the right Tweets?” Rosen responded via an e-mail. “I don’t see anything wrong with the method. The content can be criticized.”

When asked how he would criticize the tweets, the former department chair said he didn’t know the community served by The Rocky Mountain News well enough to offer useful comments.

“Can someone explain the news value of this tweet stream for Rocky Mountain News readers?” Michelle Ferrier asked on the Poynter Institute E-Media Tidbits blog. “I think the glitz of technology has taken over common sense.”

“I think there is a mania to use new technology no matter what and they aren’t thinking,” said John Windrow, night city editor at The Honolulu Advertiser. “It gives newsmen a bad name.”

Samuel Freedman, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and author of Letters to a Young Journalist, offered some more insight.

“I think that reporters are often in the uncomfortable position of reporting from settings where people are in great grief,” Freedman told ABCNews.com. “These situations call for the greatest understanding and discretion on the part of the reporter. To be putting real-time notes out there as opposed to waiting until the ceremony is over; there’s an element of pillaging a private moment of grief that I’m uncomfortable with. A memorial service for a murdered—for a slain child—is not a fit subject for play-by-play updates.”

David J. Zucker, the rabbi who officiated at the service, told ABC News that he didn’t think there was anything offensive in Morson’s live-tweeting.

“The way I see it is that it’s somebody sharing to a wider community interested and felt connected to this sad event.”

In the midst of the hullabaloo, John Temple, editor at The Rocky Mountain News went on the record to clarify matters:

As is our custom, we asked the parents of Marten Kudlis whether we could cover his funeral. To be clear: We never enter funeral services to report on them without the family’s permission. Period.

… Most of us couldn’t attend the service. But that doesn’t mean we don’t empathize with the family and don’t want to join in their mourning in some way. Marten was one family’s son before he died. But because of the way he died, his loss was felt by thousands.

One way for a news organization to help a community connect is to send information live from the service, just as we do from events ranging from political conventions to road closings to concerts and parties. We don’t have to wait to publish in the next day’s paper anymore. TV and radio don’t wait, and people seem to value that.

I can imagine some might think live updates during a solemn event might be disruptive. But typically reporters can sit at the very back of a hall, out of the way of mourners.

Ultimately, to me, it’s all about execution. Poorly done, such journalism might very well feel inappropriate. Done well, I don’t think so.

Some criticism of the short blasts our reporter sent may be justified. They can seem cold, even crass. But I am responsible for that failing. It is my job to make sure our staff is trained properly.

Think of such live reporting as someone whispering into a phone directly to a global audience. There is no room for editors. What the reporter writes is what you read almost instantly. That requires special skill. It takes practice.

But to claim there is something inherently wrong with the idea is to make too sweeping a judgment. Everything from services for major public figures like presidents and popes to ceremonies for victims of tragedies like the one at Columbine High School have long been covered by TV and radio.

… We must learn to use the new tools at our disposal. Yes, there are going to be times we make mistakes, just as we do in our newspaper.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try something. It means we need to learn to do it well. That is our mission.

Shortly after composing this piece, I shot Twitter co-founder Evan Williams a DM asking his take. He replied with the following comment:

The concept does seem odd–coming to you “live” from… a funeral. And coming to you live via Twitter probably seems uncomfortable for at least a couple more reasons:

1) As opposed to newspapers, Twitter is in general not perceived as being very serious. Therefore, perhaps reporting a funeral via Twitter make it seem like it’s not being taken seriously.

2) While a reporter covering the funeral is probably taking notes anyway, sending text messages sounds disrespectful and like he/she is not really paying attention. (In reality he/she is probably paying more attention, in order to report.)

I didn’t read the tweets from the event, so I don’t know if any were inappropriate. But as far as whether the idea itself is flawed, I’d have to agree with John Temple: If the family was okay having the event reported on in general, it being covered while it was still happening shouldn’t be that much different. In these types of matters, though, people’s initial reaction may be more important than the logical argument. I do not blame the reporter (or newspaper) for not predicting people would react that way.

My prediction would be that in the future this type of thing does not seem odd, though. Live video coverage will probably also be common (not that we haven’t seen live video of funerals already).

What do you think—did The Rocky Mountain News go too far?

What’s Twitter? Read my piece about the microblogging platform here.